The technology revolution is transforming the film industry, like most other industries today, in ways not imagined only a few years ago. While advances have been made in lighting, sound, optics, and the film itself, by far the most significant advances have been made in relation to post-production facilities which have become high-tech havens for film technicians and special effects artists. Post-production facilities are filled with computers and other electronic equipment, increasing the versatility, the efficiency, and the productivity of motion-picture production.
While the actual shooting of the motion picture on the set may be thought of as the "artistic" side of the production process involving directors, cinematographers, actors, and writers, the post-production of the film itself may be thought of as the "technical" side of the production process. And like other production processes which involve an artistic side as well as a technical side, the two sides often do not see eye to eye.
The Video Daily
As a result of the technological advances in recent years within the film industry, specifically computerized editing, production companies have increasingly relied upon the video daily. The video daily is a videotape of what was shot on film on the set on that particular day. The video daily is used by the cinematographer and the director to evaluate how a particular shot will come out at the end of production.
Prior to the development of computerized editing, editing consisted of cutting and splicing pieces of the film. In order to do this, print dailies were made. This was accomplished by processing the film stock that was shot on the set, yielding a processed negative. The processed negative was then printed, yielding positive film. The positive film was then cut and spliced.
Computerized editing is faster and more versatile than the conventional print editing.
However, print dailies cannot be used in computers; therefore, the images on processed negative needs to be transferred to videotape in order to utilize computers in editing. Computerized editing is so common today that almost 70% of processed negatives (that is, the film shot on the set) never see the light of a printer for processing into print dailies.
In order to produce a video daily, the film shot on the set by the cinematographer needs to be transferred to videotape. More specifically, the individual images or photographs made by a motion-picture camera which collectively make up a shot need to be converted and transferred to videotape. To ensure that the end product, that is, the motion picture shown in a movie theater, is of the highest quality, the quality of the video daily should be maximized.
The quality of the video daily may be affected in a number of ways. However, by far the most influential cause of poor video dailies lies in the subjective eyes of the person who actually transfers the processed negative to videotape. This person is called a telecine colorist (pronounced TELL-A-SEE-KNEE). The telecine colorist, who often has a background in sound and video engineering, controls the machine in which the processed negative is loaded and from which the corresponding video daily is extracted. This machine is called a telecine machine. The word "telecine" is an old broadcasting term derived from tele for audio and cinema for video, but has come to refer to the transfer process, after the pioneering Rank-Cintel Color Tele-Cine Device.
The actual telecine machine may employ a number of electronic devices, such as amplifiers, coders, enhancers, and color correctors, as well as a number of monitoring devices, such as video display monitors, waveform monitors, oscilloscopes, and vectorscopes, to obtain an electronic interpretation of the images recorded on the film and to manipulate or control those images during the transfer process. The subjective portion of the process lies between loading the processed negative into the machine and actually pushing the "TRANSFER" button, metaphorically speaking, on the telecine machine to transfer the images from the film to the videotape.
Turning to the subjective eyes of the telecine colorist, indeed, the subjective eyes of any human being, what one person sees is seldom the same as what another person sees. This is particularly true about color. Even if the telecine colorist studies the theory of color intensely (assuming the cinematographer has also done the same) and becomes an accomplished colorist, this does not ensure any consistency in reading colors. Analogously, just as the knowledge of acoustics does not make one musical, neither on the productive nor on the appreciative side, no color system by itself can develop one's sensitivity for color. And as color is paramount in setting the mood and creating a feeling in a motion picture, color is one of the most important tools of the cinematographer in setting up a scene to be shot.
Tantamount in importance to color is lighting. The cinematographer has at his or her disposal a wide variety of lights with which to work in creating scenes. When working with light, one always has the complementary shadow. The amount of light radiating from a light area of a scene and a dark area of a scene is known as contrast. Photographic films are capable of recording a limited range of light and dark areas in a scene, much like the human eye. For example, if a person has a bright light shining in his or her eyes while standing in a dark room, that person will not be able to see anything in the shadows of the room until the light is moved away. In other words, the contrast between the bright light and the dark room is too great for the person's eyes handle.
This inconsistent, uncontrollable, and inferior ability of the eye to be able to maintain control of what it actually sees is well discussed by Josef Albers in his book INTERACTION OF COLOR (Yale University, 1963). And if the eyes of a single person possess such inferior abilities, the different eyes of different people are absolutely uncontrollable in what is actually seen by more than one pair of eyes. In demonstrating the how the eye works in reading light and color of a scene or photograph, the following discussion is provided, concentrating on color but being equally applicable to light (i.e., contrast).
If one says "red" (the name of the color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different. Even when a certain color is specified which all listeners have seen innumerable times--such as the red of Coca-Cola.TM. signs which is substantially the same red all over the world--they will still think of many different reds. Even if all the listeners have hundreds of reds in front of them from which to choose the Coca-Cola red, they will again select quite different colors. And no one can be sure that he has found the precise red shade. And even if that round, red Coca-Cola sign with the white name in the middle is actually shown so that everyone focuses on the same red, each will receiver the same projection on his retina, but no one can be sure whether each has the same perception.
In musical compositions, so long as we hear merely single tones, we do not hear music. Hearing music depends on the recognition of the collective interaction of individual tones, their placing and their spacing, in creating harmony and melody. In writing, a knowledge of spelling has nothing to do with an understanding of poetry. Equally, a factual identification of light and colors within a given scene has nothing to do with a sensitive seeing nor with an understanding of the light action or the color action within the scene.
Although we are able to hear a single tone, we almost never (that is, without special devices) see a single color unconnected and unrelated to other colors. Colors present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbors and changing conditions.
Imagine in front of us three pots of water, from left to right:
______________________________________ WARM LUKEWARM COLD ______________________________________
When the hands are dipped first into the outer containers, one feels, i.e., experiences and perceives, two different temperatures:
______________________________________ WARM (at left) (at right) COLD ______________________________________
Then dipping both hands into the middle container, one perceives again two different temperatures, this time, however, in reversed order:
(at left) COLD-WARM (at right)
though the water is neither of these temperatures, but of another, namely:
LUKEWARM
Herewith one experiences a discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect called, in this case, a haptic illusion (haptic being related to the sense of touch) of the haptic sense. In much the same way as haptic sensations deceive us, so optical illusions deceive. They lead us to "see" and to "read" light and colors other than those with which we are confronted physically.
If one is not able to distinguish the difference between a higher tone and a lower tone, one probably should not make music. If a parallel conclusion were applied to color, almost everyone would prove incompetent for working with color. Very few people are able to distinguish higher and lower light intensity between different hues.
Since the discovery of photography and particularly since the development of photomechanical reproduction processes, we are exposed to pictures from all over the world. Black-and-white pictures are printed in only one black on a white background. Visually, however, these pictures consist of grey shades of the finest gradations between polar extremes of black and white. These shades penetrate each other in varying degrees. In color photography and color reproduction, a parallel reading of lighter and darker color is necessary.
In visualizing a scene and subsequently photographing a scene, the sensitivity and consequently the registration of the retina of an eye is different from the sensitivity and the registration of a photographic film. For example, black-and-white film generally registers all lights lighter and all darks darker than the what the eye perceives. This is why film companies have developed many different types of film which are more sensitive to different colors. For example, two of the color slide films which Eastman Kodak.TM. markets is Kodachrome.TM. and Ektachrome.TM.. Kodachrome was developed to enhance warms colors like reds and yellows, and Ektachrome was developed to enhance cool colors like greens and blues. In motion picture film, there are on the order of 20 or more different films available to the cinematographer. Also, photographic equipment manufactures develop a myriad of filters to aide the photographer in recording a scene as desired. All of these aide the cinematographer in setting up a scene to be shot, and all lead to variations in color in the resulting processed negative.
However, the production of the video daily of what the cinematographer has just shot is now in the hands (rather, the eyes) of the telecine operator (the technician) and not the hands of the cinematographer (the artist). By making subjective adjustments to the telecine machine, the telecine operator may lose contrast in the image, thereby losing important detail in dark shadowed areas or bright highlighted areas.
From the foregoing, the light and the color which the cinematographer sees and has in mind in all likelihood is not be the same light and color which the telecine colorist sees when transferring the film to videotape. Accordingly, the video daily will not maintain the integrity of the images on the film and, thus, will not provide the cinematographer with a true reproduction of the scene to be evaluated by the video daily. Further, in addition to the subjectivity of the colorist, eye fatigue of the colorist adds to the inconsistent and poor quality of video dailies. Also, the settings of the telecine machine may "drift," causing further inconsistent transfer of images onto videotape.
Conventional film-to-video transfer techniques suffer prevalent and frustrating problems in the discrepancy between what the cinematographer and the telecine colorist respectively see and what the telecine colorist subsequently acts upon in producing the video daily.